“It’s the second-oldest technique in modern psychology, after hypnosis,” Jen told him. “Some say free association was Freud’s greatest discovery, almost making up for some of his worst blunders. The technique lets all the little selves within us speak out, see? No matter how thoroughly a bit or corner is outvoted by the rest, free association lets it slip in that occasional word or clue.

“Actually, we free associate in everyday life, as well. Our little subselves speak out in slips of the tongue or pen, or in those sudden, apparently irrelevant fantasies or memories that just seem to pop into mind, as if out of nowhere. Or snatches of songs you haven’t heard in years.”

Nelson nodded. He was starting to see what Jen was driving at, and felt intensely relieved. So all of this has something to do with my studies, after all. I was afraid she wanted me to face that program ’cause she thought I was crazy.

Not that he felt all that sure of his own mental balance anymore. That one session had exposed so many raw nerves, so many places where it hurt — memories from a childhood he’d thought normal enough, but which still had left him with his own share of wounds.

He shook his head to knock back those gloomy thoughts. Everybody has shit like that to deal with. She wouldn’t be wasting time on me if she thought I was nuts.

“You’re tellin’ me this has to do with cooperation and competition,” he said, concentrating on the abstract.

“That’s right. All the current multimind theories of consciousness agree on one thing, that each of us is both many and one, all at the same time. In that sense, we humans are most catholic beings.”

Obviously, she had just made a witticism, which had gone completely over his head. Fortunately, the session was being recorded by his note plaque and he could hunt down her obscure reference later. Nelson chose not to get sidetracked. “So inside of me I’ve got… what? A barbarian and a criminal and a sex maniac…”

“And a scholar and a gentleman and a hero,” she agreed. “And a future husband and father and leader, maybe. Though few psychologists anymore say metaphors like that are really accurate. The mind’s internal landscape doesn’t map directly onto the formal roles of the outer world. At least, not as directly as we used to think.

“Nor are the boundaries between our subpersonae usually so crisp or clear. Only in special cases, like divided personality disorder, do they become what you or I would call distinct characters or personalities.

Nelson pondered that — the cacophony within his head. Until coming to Kuwenezi, he had hardly been aware of it. He’d always believed there was just one Nelson Grayson. That core Nelson still existed. In fact, it felt stronger than ever. Still, at the same time, he had grown better at listening to the ferment just below the surface. He leaned forward. “We talked before about how — how the cells in my body compete and cooperate to make a whole person. And I been reading some of those theories ’bout how individual people could be looked at the same way… like, y’know, organs or cells cooperating and competing to make up societies? And how the same… metaphor—”

“How the same metaphor’s been applied to the role species play in Earth’s ecosphere, yes. Those are useful comparisons, so long as we remember that’s all they are. Just comparisons, similes, models of a much more complicated reality.”

He nodded. “But now you’re sayin’ even our minds are like that?”

“And why not?” Dr. Wolling laughed. “The same processes formed complexity in nature, in our bodies, and in cultures. Why shouldn’t they work in our minds as well?”

Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. “But then, why do we think we’re individuals? Why do we hide from ourselves the fact we’re so many inside? What’s the me that’s thinkin’ this, right now?”

Jen smiled, and sat back. “My boy. My dear boy. Has anyone ever told you that you have a rare and precious gift?”

At first Nelson thought she was referring to his unexpected talent with animals and in managing the ecology of ark four. But she corrected that impression. “You have a knack for asking the right questions, Nelson. Would it surprise you to learn the one you just posed is probably the deepest, most perplexing in psychology? Perhaps in all philosophy?”

Nelson shrugged. The way he felt whenever Jen praised him was proof enough that he had many selves. While one part of him felt embarrassment each time she did this, another basked in the one thing he wanted most, her approval.

“Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness for centuries,” she went on. “Julian Jaynes called it the ‘analog I.’ The power to name some central locus ‘me’ seems to give intensity and focus to each individual human drama. Is this something totally unique to humanity? Or just a commodity? Something we only have a bit more of than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees?

“Is consciousness imbued in what some call the ‘soul’? Is it a sort of monarch of the mind? A higher-order creature, set there to rule over all the ‘lower’ elements?

“Or is it, as some suggest, no more than another illusion? Like a wave at the surface of the ocean, which seems

’real’ enough but is never made of the same bits of water from one minute to the next?”

Nelson knew an assignment when he heard one. Sure enough, Jen next reached into her pouch and took out a pair of small objects, which she slid across the table toward him. “Here are some things to study. One contains articles by scholars as far back as Ornstein and Minsky and Bukhorin. I think you’ll find them useful as you write up your own speculations for next time.”

He reached for the items, perplexed. One was a standard gigabyte infocell. But the other wasn’t even a chip. He recognized the disk as an old-style metal coin and read the words united states of America imprinted around its rim.

“Take a look at the motto,” she suggested.

He didn’t know what that meant, so he searched for the most incomprehensible thing on it. “E… pluribus… unum?” he pronounced carefully.

“Mmm,” she confirmed, and said nothing more. Nelson sighed. Naturally, he was going to have to look it up for himself.

By all the numbers, it should have happened long ago.

Jen thought about consciousness, a topic once dear to her, but which she’d given little attention to for some time. Until all these new adventures overturned her pleasant, iconoclastic existence and threw her back to contemplating the basics again. Now she couldn’t help dwelling on the subject during her walk back to the Tangoparu digs.

It’s close to a century since they’ve been talking about giving machines “intelligence.” And still they run up against this barrier of self-awareness. Still they say, “It’s sure to come sometime in the next twenty years or so! “As if they really know.

Stars glittered over the dusty path as she made her way from Kuwenezi’s compact, squat, storm-proof ark four, past fields of newly sprouted winter wheat, toward the gaping entrance of the old gold mine. The quandary stayed with her as she rode the elevator deep into the Earth.

Simulation programs keep getting better. Now they mimic faces, hold conversations, pass Turing tests. Some may fool you up to an hour if you aren’t careful.

And yet you can always tell, if you pay attention. Simulations, that’s all they are.

Funny thing. According to theoreticians, big computers should have been able to perform human-level thought at least two decades ago. Something was missing, and as her conversations with Nelson brought her back to basics, Jen thought she knew what it was.

No single entity, all by itself, can ever be whole.

That was the paradox. It was delicious in a way, like the ancient teaser, “This sentence is a lie.” And yet, hadn’t Kurt Godel shown, mathematically, that no closed system of logic can ever “prove” all its own implied theorems? Hadn’t Donne said, “No man is an island”?